Series: Polity Cultural History of Literature Series

This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English
literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the
sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in
fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for
they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself
emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time,
that it floated free of any social reality or function.
This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English
writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of
both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings
in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas,
describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle
English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and
cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the
particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used
to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work.
Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the
most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as
well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction
to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to
each of them.